RonPrice

Section 1: W.H. Auden(1907–1973) was an English poet, playwright, and essayist who lived and worked in the United States for much of the second half of his life. His work represents one of the major achievements of twentieth-century literature. “Auden took seriously his membership in the Anglican Church and derived many of his moral and aesthetic ideas from Christian doctrines developed over two millennia, but he valued his church and its doctrines only to the degree that they helped to make it possible to love one’s neighbour as oneself.”1 T.S. Eliot thought of religion as “the still point in the turning world,” “the heart of light,” “the crowned knot of fire,” “the door we never opened”—something that remained inaccessible, perfect, and eternal, whether or not he or anyone else cared about it, something absolutely unlike the sordid transience of human life. Section 2: W.H. Auden thought of religion as derived from the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”—an obligation to other human beings despite all their imperfections and his own, and an obligation to the inescapable reality of this world, not a visionary, inaccessible world that might or might not exist somewhere else. Auden’s Christianity shaped the tone and content of his poems and was for most of his life the central focus of his art and thought. It was also the aspect of his life and work that seems to have been the least understood by his readers and friends, partly because he sometimes talked about it in suspiciously frivolous terms, partly because he used Christian vocabulary in ways that, a few centuries earlier, might have attracted the Inquisitor’s attention.1-Ron Price with thanks to 1Edward Mendelson, “Auden and God,” 6/12/’07, a review of Auden and Christianityfile:///C:\Users\Ron\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif by Arthur Kirsch in The New York Review of Books, 21/3/’13. Section 3: In October 1967 just as I was settling into my second month teaching grade 3 Inuit kids on Baffin Island….W. H. Auden gave the T. S. Eliot Lectures at University of Kent in the UK. Auden took-up some of Eliot’s themes, martyrdom, & relations between poetry, belief, words, & the Word: Any heaven we think it decent to enter Must be Ptolomaic with ourselves at the centre.1 Auden sought what he eventually found: single style that was more than capable of answering literary need, and I did, too… as the years passed into this new 21st century!!2 1 Auden quoted by Denis Donoghue in “Worldling”, The New York Review of Books. 19/6/’69. 2 Auden found a religious base to his poetic, as did I. I, too, was an Anglican, but only in the late 1950s, before I joined the Baha’i Faith from which I derived many of my moral and aesthetic ideas within Baha’i doctrines developed over two centuries.

[h=1]LETTER WRITING: 2 JOB APPLICATIONS A WEEK[/h][h=2]FOR 50 YEARS---JOB HUNTING 1957-2007[/h] The 3600 word statement which follows describes my transition from employment and the job-hunting process which took place from 1957 to 2007 to retirement and the pursuit of a leisure life devoted to writing in the years 1999 to 2011(the present). The years 1999 to 2007 marked the years of transition. During these years I also gave up PT work and most casual-volunteer work. The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer need or use in any direct sense in the job-hunting world after fifty years of use, but which I occasionally post on the internet for a range of purposes, should help anyone wanting to know something about my personal and professional background, my writing and my life. This resume is useful now, in many other contexts, as some residue, some leftover, but not to assess my suitability for some advertised or unadvertised employment position. This resume could be useful for some readers in cyberspace to assess the relevance of some statements I make on the internet, statements on a wide variety of topics at a wide variety of internet sites. If I feel there is a need for readers to have some idea of my background, my credentials and my experience; if I feel that it would be useful for them to have a personal context for my remarks at an internet site, I post that resume. But I do not post that resume here. This post, this essay, for it is a sort of essay or article, is a statement, an overview of my job application life. This overview may be of value to those who have to run-the-gauntlet in the job-hunting world, and it is a gauntlet for millions of people. Let there be no mistake about that. My intention is to be of encouragement; to help those who read this statement become more persistent, more optimistic about their own position, a position which is often a bleak one, in a bleak house. I never apply for jobs anymore, although I have registered at several internet sites whose role is, among other things, to help people get jobs. Perhaps this act of registration at such sites on the world-wide-web is an act in which I engage out of some sense of nostalgia, out of habit, out of an inability to stop applying for jobs after five decades of persistent and strenuous efforts in that direction. These decades of efforts were aimed at obtaining jobs, better jobs, jobs more suited to my talents, jobs that paid better, jobs that freed me from impossible situations which I had become involved with, some work-scene in which I was ensconced--along the road of life. I stopped applying for full-time jobs, as I say, in September 2007 and part-time ones in December 2003. I also disengaged myself from most volunteer or casual work six years ago in 2005 so that I could occupy myself as: an independent scholar, a writer, a poet, a journalist, a publisher, indeed, what some might call a man of leisure in the Greek tradition. At the age of 67, then, and on two old-age pensions, one from Canada where I worked from 1961 to 1971 and an Australian pension, I am in one of the formal conditions, one of the many definitions, of old age. I am now in the middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80), as one model that the human development theorists in the field of psychology use to define this period in the lifespan. I have become self-employed in the many roles I outlined above. None of these roles pay any money, although I did receive royalties for my books at one internet site. The royalties were for six years of the sale of one of my books at that site. I received a cheque for $1.49. Years ago, back in the 1970s if I recall correctly, I could have bought one of those chocolate frogs for, at the time and again if I recall correctly, 25 cents. But at 50 cents, their current price, this money, these royalties, only allow me to buy one frog every two years. I have gradually come to this current, some would say, penurious role in the years after I left full-time employment in 1999, more than a decade ago. Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 hours a week on average in a job as was the case in the three decades from 1969 to 1999; and not being occupied with giving many other hours to community activity, as I had been for so many years as was the case from at least 1969 to 1999, marked a turning point in my life. I became able to devote my time to a much more extensive involvement in writing and reading material of my own choice. The ancient Greeks believed leisure was much more than free time. It was free time well used, free time with a moral mission. In the Politics, Aristotle makes this arresting assertion: The first principle of all action is leisure…. Leisure is better than occupation and is its end; and therefore the question must be asked, what ought we to do when at leisure? Clearly we ought not to be amusing ourselves, for then amusement would be the end of life. Aristotelians see human time divided into three major spheres: (1) working for a living, (2) recovering from working for a living, and (3) leisure time. Leisure is the highest use of time. It is the antithesis of "wasting time" or "killing time" with diversions and amusements. Nor is it rest and relaxation; the downtime we need to recover from work should really be considered an extension of work. After several years of retirement from the different kinds of work which involved me from 1957 to 2007--from FT, PT, casual and volunteer work--a period in which, in some ways, I am still recovering, I have begun to enter, sensibly and insensibly, by subtle and not-so-subtle degrees, Aristotle’s third major division of time into which life can be divided. After nearly fifty years of the first two kinds of work I am finally free to pursue leisure in the recreational, in the old, sense of the word, a sense that is indispensable to achieving our human potential. Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary, hopefully stimulating, but not always pleasurable leisure-time, part-time or full-time pursuit. In my case, as I say, in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80), writing and its companion activity research and reading has become full-time about 60 hours a week. This activity is for me, and for the most part, an enriching and enjoyable pursuit. I have replaced my former paid employment and extensive activity with people in community with a form of work which is also a form of leisure, namely, as I say: writing and reading—independent scholarship. Not all is easy-sailing on the western-front, though: health issues still abound; money is, at worst, an annoying tick and the inner battle of life, the only real one which we all face, still goes on. Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of the person, their experience and, often, their philosophy. On occasion, I set out a summary of my writing, my employment experience, my resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this introductory statement, this commentary on the job application process which occupied my life for five decades: 1957-2007. If as that famous, although not always highly regarded, psychologist Carl Jung writes: we are what we do, then some of what I was and am can be found in that attachment, that resume and its several appendices. That document may seem over-the-top as they say these days since it now occupies some 30 pages and many more pages if the appendices are also included. Half a century of various forms of employment as well as community, leisure and volunteer activity in the professional and not-so-professional world, all this time in many towns, institutions and venues produced a great pile of stuff. It also produced what used to be called and still is by several different names: one’s curriculum vitae, one’s CV, one’s bio-data sheet, one’s resume, one’s life-narrative, life-story, storyline. This document is now, at least as I see it, more of the latter, more of a lifeline, a life-narrative, a memoir, an autobiography-of-sorts. As I say, I make the list of this stuff available to readers of this account, this essay, when appropriate, when requested and, occasionally, when not appropriate. I update those many pages to include recent writing projects I have completed, or am in the process of completing, during these first years of my retirement from full-time, part-time and most volunteer activity. My resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of another adventure, another bit of gadding about, another slice of a quasi-pioneering-travelling, a peripatetic existence, a moving from town to town, from one state or province to another, from one country to another, from one piece of God's, or gods', Earth to another piece of it. And so it was that I was able to come to work in another organization, gain entry to another portion of my life and enjoy or not enjoy a new world and a new landscape with a whole new set of people and experiences, some familiar and some not so. The process, I often thought, was not unlike a modern form of a traditional rite-de-passage. To some extent I came to take on what often seemed like another personality, another me in the long road to discover if, indeed, there was a Real Me underneath all this coming and going. I'm sure this process will continue, will also be the case in all its many forms in these years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++), if I last that long and should, for some reason, movement to yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be necessary to continue for some reason I can not, as yet, anticipate. This continued movement, though, seems highly unlikely as I go through these years of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life, from sunset and early evening to night’s first hours and then, finally, the last hours of night, the final syllables of my recorded time. This process, this rite de passage, expressed in the form of yet another job in another place seems, for the moment, to have come to an end. Time, of course, will tell. The last six years(60-66) are, as I indicated above, the first ones of late adulthood. In this first dozen years of my retirement(1999 to 2011), I have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able to do in those years of my early(1965-1984) and middle(1984-1999) adulthood when job, family and the demands of various community projects kept my nose to the grindstone, as they say colloquially in many parts of the world. With the final unloading of much of the volunteer work as well which I took on when I first retired, in the years from 1999 to 2005; with the gradual cessation of virtually the entire apparatus and process of job-application by 2007; with my last child having left home in 2005; with a more settled home environment than I’ve ever had--by 2007 and with a new medication for the bipolar disorder that afflicted my life since my teens, also by 2007---the remaining years of my late adulthood beckon bright with promise. As I indicated briefly above, though, all is not clear-sailing for rarely in life is everything clear sailing, at least in my own life—and I suspect this is the case in most if not all of our lives, if we are honest about our experience down life’s road. My resume reflects the shift in role, in my lifespan activity-base and lists the many writing projects I’ve been able to complete in this first decade of independent scholarship and full-time writing. The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern for fifty years, 1949 to 1999, is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi--to use two still commonly used Latin phrases. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place, a domain, a bailiwick as politicians often call their electorate. Such people and other types as well often have very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although a great degree of inner change, extensive inner shifting, is inevitable from a person’s teens through to their late adulthood even if they sat all their lives on the head of a pin and never moved from the parental nest. That reference to the head of a pin was one of the theologico-philosophical metaphors associated with angels and often used in medieval times. This metaphor has interesting applications to the job-hunting process but I will leave that for another time. This process of extensive change in people’s lives is even more true in the recent decades of our modern age at this climacteric of history in which change is about the only thing one can take as a constant--or so we are often led to believe because it is so often said in the electronic media. For many millions of people during the half century 1957 to 2007, my years of being jobbed and applying for jobs, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context. This was true for me during those years when I was looking for amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment security and comfort, my adventurous years in a new form of travelling-pioneering, globe-trotting, pathfinding of sorts, as part of history’s long story, my applying-for-job days, some five decades from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. My resume altered many times, of course, during those fifty years. It is now, for the most part and as I indicated above, not used in these years of my retirement and especially since 2007, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested readers, 99.9% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites. This document, as I say above, a document that used to be called a curriculum vitae or a CV, until the 1970s, at least in the region where I lived and dwelled and had my being, is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry. Some poets and writers, artists and creative people in many fields, though, regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, life-narrative, personal background as irrelevant, simply not necessary for people to know, in order for them to appreciate their artistic work. These people take the philosophical, indeed, somewhat religious position, that they are not what they do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "they are not their jobs." I frequently use this resume at various internet locations on the World Wide Web, again as I indicated above, when I want to provide some introductory background on myself. I could list many new uses after decades of a use which had a multifactorial motivational base: to help me get a job, to get a new job, to help me make more money, to enrich my experience and to add something refreshing to my life as it was becoming increasingly stale for so many reasons in the day-to-day grind, to help me get away from supervisors and from situations I could not handle or were a cause of great stress, to help me flee from settings where my health was preventing me from continuing successfully in my job, to help me engage in new forms of adventure, pioneering, amusement, indeed, to help me survive life’s tests in the myriad forms that afflict the embattled spirit, et cetera, et cetera, inter alia, inter alia, inter alter, inter alter. The use of the resume always saved me from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One could photocopy it and mail it out with the covering letter to anyone and everyone. The photocopier became a common feature of the commercial, business and government world in the 1960s just as I began to send out the first of the literally thousands of job applications that I would over the next forty years: 1967-2007. One didn’t have to write the application out each time; one did not have to “say it again Sam” in resume after resume to the point of utter tedium. The photocopier itself evolved as did the gestetner, one of the photocopier’s predecessors. There were many ways one could copy one's basic data. For a time, my mother used to type applications for me back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I became entrenched in the job market in the 1960s. This entrenchment was so very much like trench-warfare back in that Great War of 1914 to 1918--when millions died, were simply mowed down on the European continent in a process whose meaning we have yet to fully plumb. But, however little or much we have come to understand the meaning and significance of WW1, we--my generation--have come to experience a new warfare. As Henry Miller, one of the first to get away with using the "F" word in his trilogy: Sexus, Nexus and Plexus, expressed back in 1941 the new warfare of my generation: "a war far more terrible than the destruction" of the first two wars, the first two phases, with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble." It is not my intention to document any of these three phases of the destructive calamity that visited humankind in the century I have just left, for this documentation has been done in intimate detail elsewhere, both visually, orally and in print. I do not document, but I frequently refer, to these three phases. I have different purposes here than mere historical documentation. My job application process was clearly, at least as I look back over half a century of the process, part of that third war. Applying for jobs as extensively as I did in the days before the email and the internet came on board in the early 1990s, became an activity, for me, that sometimes resembling a dry-wretch. Four to five thousand job applications from 1957 to 2007 is a lot of applications! At least since the mid-1990s, a few clicks of one’s personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of life’s game could go on or could come to a quick end over a set of wires under the ground, the electronic world of cyberspace. During that half-century of job-hunting years I applied, as I say, for some four to five thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this fifty year period. The great bulk, 99.9% of those thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of them, perhaps half a dozen of all those letters, in a file in my Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X, a part of my autobiographical work which is now entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs goes for 2600 pages in five volumes and, due to its length, will not likely be read while I occupy space on this mortal coil. Much of my autobiography, portions of it, are now found, though, on the internet at a multitude of sites where in nano-micro-seconds anyone can find portions of my writing in addition to my autobiography or my resume. I am known in a multitude of microcosms, microworlds, miniworlds, where neither name nor fame can reach me, and where all the problems that go with any degree of celebrity status in our fame-hungry world will pass me by into cyberspace, into an electronic ether. Given the thousands of hours over so many years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to my venture across two continents, two marriages, with at least two personalities being the bipolar person that I am; given that this new style of pioneering, voyaging-via-employment, venture in our time has been at the core of my life with so much that has radiated around this core; given the amount of paper produced, the amount of energy expended and the amount of money earned and spent in this great exercise of survival; given the amount of writing done in the context of those various jobs, some of this employment-related correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life. It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire as I recently entered the years when I no longer applied for jobs, to write this short statement(“not short enough,” I can hear them say) fitting all those thousands of unkept resumes and job-applications into a larger context as well as all those letters, emails and internet posts written in connection with trying to make connections with others, into some larger framework of action and meaning. For those who would like to read more on this theme, I invite them to go to the internet site: Baha’i Library Online>Secondary Source Material>Personal Letters>The Letters of RonPrice: 1961-2011. If such readers prefer, they can simply google: Ron Price Letters and more of this story will become available with only a few clicks. Updated on: 13/3/’11 3700 Words

I have edited the first two paragraphs, Xiqqin, to give you some idea of the problems of English expression you have. You need to: (a) do lots of writing and (b) have someone correcting your English one page at a time. I am not your man, as I indicated in my first email to you. This is the kind of thing I did for 30 years or more and I have had enough of this kind of activity in my life. Sorry about that—as I said at first.-Ron Price, Tasmania. -------------------- Topic: “Governments should focus more on solving the immediate problems of today rather than trying to solve the anticipated problems of the future.” -------------------------- I have edited the following: ------------------ A successful gvernment should find a point of compromise between immediate pain and anticipated ills on the one hand and pleasures and gains on the other--and keep this point as the base, the turning point, of the required analysis. This point, this compromise, is not a precise one, not a half-way point for example. It’s more often than not biased toward long-term ills. It’s somewhat like a dieing man diagnosed with leukemia. He should set aside the problem of his appearance that some necessay treatment will bring about. He should take every operation so as to survive; indeed, he must if he wants to survive. From generation to generation in history there is much evidence that governments take action for short-term results and in the process lose the big picture and ultimately lose everything. To put it more plainly let me add the following. Any government that is short-sighted will worsen not only the nation’s situation in the near-future but in the long range; for example, when Ronald Reagan came to office 28 years ago, his major challenge was soaring inflation. His three predecessors----Richard Nixon,Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter----had tried to confront this problem without much headway. Was it due to the excessive attention that these three presidents gave to long-term ills or due to the fact that they turned a deaf ear to short-term economic problems? Perhaps it was neither factor. Short-term pain caused them so much concern that they spared no effort to take what they thought to be reasonable measures in the short run. That’s why Nixon’s revenue sharing policy, Ford’s inflation policy and Carter’s anti-inflation policy never worked. ------------edited work finished at this point.------------------------- Yet,on the other bright side,If a government can bear the short-run pain and go ahead to take initiatives concerning the long-run issues,it will lead the nation to the right track..Mr Reagon adopted the course to cut taxes at the same time allowed the a Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Vocker the freedom to attack the inflation by sharply raising interest rate.But in the early 1980’s Mr Vocher was blamed for causing a severe recession that bagan in the early Mr Reagon’s tenure and continued through November 1982.The Republicans lost a loss in 1982 midterm election and the Demoncrats thought they werr in good shape to win back the White House in 1984.Instead the economy was clearly in recovery by then and inflation was down sharply.Mr. Reagan was re-elected in a landslide, and was so successful that he became the first president since Calvin Coolidge to leave office and be succeeded by a member of his own party. However,does that mean that the government should turn a blind eye to recent tricky issues?Not necessaily,However forward-looking and sagacious a government is,it won’t survive long in harmony cause soon it will drive itself to a deadend cutting off all its leeway----like a man in lybrinth give up every chance to approach the exit only to find himself surrounded by cold walls in a blind alley.To bring home this point,I’ll take the reason why governments’ve always been striving for a smooth short-run growing trend of GDP as an illustritive example.By maintain the growth rate in a range can maximize the surpluss amount of gross production.In only a month a nation with .9 growth rate the first 15 days and also .9 percent the last 15 days gains more than on e with .10 percent the first 15 days and .8 percent the rest days.Thus,short-run pain should also be given enough attention unless the government will suffer from the consequences of it in the long run. As I mentioned at the begining,the governments should focus on the long-term-biased point compromising the short-term pain and long-term ills.It makes the best manifestation that Obama’s eventual success as president depend a lot on a willingness to do what Mr Reagon did:be willing to combat long-term economic problems while accepting short-term pain and the risk of a prolonged slowdown that could damage his popularity. In doing so, he would be wise to keep in focus the longer-term problems that need to be solved, and to try to stimulate the economy without worsening those problems. They include severe budget deficits, crumbling infrastructure, accelerating costs for health care and a housing crisis marked by falling prices and rising foreclosures. All in all,the government should try their best to avoid worstening immediate pain and focus on the long-run well-being,if needed,at the cost of short-term pain.:grad: -------------------------------------THE END---------------------------

I am now working on this document.-Ron....will post it back when finished.

LETTER WRITING: 2 JOB APPLICATIONS A WEEK FOR 50 YEARS---JOB HUNTING 1957-2007 The information and details in my resume, a resume I no longer need or use in any direct sense in the job-hunting world after fifty years of use, should help anyone wanting to know something about my personal and professional background, my writing and my life. This resume might be useful, in some residual capacity, for the few who want to assess my suitability for some advertised or unadvertised employment position which, I must emphasize again, I never apply for anymore--at least in any direct sense. I have registered at several internet sites whose role is, among other things, to help people get jobs. Perhaps this process of registration at such sites is engaged with some sense of nostalgia, out of habit, out of an inability to stop applying for jobs after five decades of persistent and strenuous efforts to obtain jobs, better jobs, jobs more suited to my talents, jobs that paid better, jobs that freed me from the impossible situations I had become involved with in some job I already had--along the road of life. I stopped applying for full-time jobs, as I say, in September 2007 and part-time ones in December 2003. I also disengaged myself from most volunteer or casual work three years ago in 2005. At the age of 64, then, on the eve of the Australian Old Age Pension, eight months, in fact, away from the formal condition of old age, I have become, self-employed as a writer-poet, an independent scholar. I have gradually come to this role in the years after I left full-time employment in 1999, nine years ago. Not being occupied with earning a living and giving myself to 60 hours a week in a job and many other hours to community activity, as I had been for so many years, marked a turning point in my life. I became able to devote my time to a much more extensive involvement in writing and reading material of my own choice. Writing is for most of its votaries a solitary, hopefully stimulating, but not always pleasurable leisure-time, part-time or full-time pursuit. In my case in these first years(60-65) of late adulthood(60-80), writing has become full-time about 60 hours a week. And this activity is, for the most part, an enriching and enjoyable pursuit. I have replaced my former paid employment and extensive activity with people in community with a form of work which is also a form of leisure, namely: writing and reading—independent scholarship. Inevitably the style of one's writing and what one reads is a reflection of the person, their experience and their philosophy. On occasion, I set out a summary of my writing, my employment experience, my resume, in an attachment to this brief essay, this introductory statement, this commentary on the job application process which occupied my life for five decades. If as that famous although not always highly regarded psychologist Carl Jung writes: we are what we do, then some of what I was and am could and can be found in that attachment, that resume and its several appendices. That document may seem over-the-top as they say these days since it now occupies nearly 30 pages and many more pages if the appendices are also included. Half a century of various forms of employment as well as community, leisure and volunteer activity in the professional and not-so-professional world, all this time in many places produced a great pile of what used to be called one’s curriculum vitae, one’s CV, one’s bio-data and is now, at least as I see it, more of a lifeline, a life-narrative, a memoir, an autobiography-of-sorts. As I say, I make the list of this stuff available to readers of this account when appropriate, when requested and, occasionally, when not appropriate. I update those many pages to include recent writing projects I have completed or am in the process of completing during these first years of my retirement from full-time, part-time and most volunteer activity. My resume has always been the piece of writing, the statement, the document, the entry ticket which has opened up the possibilities of another adventure, another bit of gadding about, another slice of a quasi-pioneering, peripatetic existence of moving from town to town, from one state or province to another, from one country to another, one piece of God's, or gods', earth to another piece. And so I come to work in another organization, gain entry to another portion of my life, like a modern form of a traditional rite-de-passage, and come to take on what often seems like another personality, another me in the long road to discover if, indeed, there is a Real Me underneath all this coming and going. I'm sure this process will continue, will also be the case in all its many forms in these years of my late adulthood(60-80) and old age(80++) should, for some reason, movement to yet another place or, indeed, from place to place be necessary to continue for some reason I can not, as yet, anticipate. This continued movement, though, seems highly unlikely as I go through these early years(60-65) of late adulthood and head into the last stages of my life, from sunset and early evening to night’s first hours and then, finally, the last hours of night, the final syllables of my recorded time. This rite de passage expressed in the form of yet another job in another place seems to have come to an end. Time, of course, will tell. In the last four years(60-64) which are, as I indicate, the first ones of late adulthood, a period developmental psychologists call the years from 60 to 80; and in this first decade of my retirement(1999 to 2009), I have been able to write to a much greater extent than I had ever been able to do in those years of my early(1965-1984) and middle(1984-1999) adulthood when job, family and the demands of various community projects kept my nose to the grindstone as they say colloquially in many parts of the world. With the final unloading of much of the volunteer work which I took on when I first retired, in the years from 1999 to 2005; with the gradual cessation of virtually the entire apparatus and process of job-application by 2007; with my last child having left home in 2005; with a more settled home environment than I’ve ever had by 2007 and with a new medication for the bipolar disorder that afflicted my life since my teens, also by 2007, the remaining years of my late adulthood beckon bright with promise. My resume reflects the shift in role, in my lifespan activity-base and lists the many writing projects I’ve been able to complete in this first decade of independent scholarship and full-time writing. The process of frequent moves and frequent jobs which was my pattern for fifty years, 1949 to 1999, is not everyone's style, modus operandi or modus vivendi. Many millions of people live and die in the same town, city or state and their life's adventure takes place within that physical region, the confines of a relatively small place, a domain, a bailiwick as politicians often call their electorate. Such people and other types as well often have very few jobs in their lifetime. Physical movement is not essential to psychological and spiritual growth, nor is a long list of jobs, although a great degree of inner change, extensive inner shifting, is inevitable from a person’s teens through to their late adulthood even if they sat all their lives on the head of a pin, one of the theologico- philosophical metaphors associated with angels and often used in medieval times. This process of extensive change is even more true in the recent decades of modern time at this climacteric of history in which change is about the only thing one can take as a constant--or so we are often led to believe because it is so often said in the media of most places. For many millions of people during the half century 1957 to 2007, my years of being jobbed and applying for jobs, the world was their oyster, not so much in the manner of a tourist, although there was plenty of that, but rather in terms of working lives which came to be seen increasingly in a global context. This was true for me during those years when I was looking for amusement, education and experience, some stimulating vocation and avocation, some employment security and comfort, my adventurous years in a new form of pioneering, globe-trotting, pathfinding of sorts, as part of history’s long story, my applying-for-job days, some five decades from the 1950s to the first decade of the new millennium. My resume altered many times, of course, during those fifty years. It is now, for the most part and as I indicated above, not used in these years of my retirement and especially since 2007, except as an information and bio-data vehicle for interested readers, 99.9% of whom are on the internet at its plethora of sites. This document, as I say above, a document that used to be called a curriculum vitae or a CV, until the 1970s, at least in the region where I lived and dwelled and had my being, is a useful backdrop for those examining my writing, especially my poetry. Some poets and writers, artists and creative people in many fields, though, regard their CV, resume, bio-data, lifeline, life-story, life-narrative, personal background as irrelevant, simply not necessary for people to know, in order for them to appreciate their artistic work. These people take the philosophical, indeed, somewhat religious position, that they are not what they do or, to put it a little differently and a little more succinctly, "they are not their jobs." I frequently use this resume at various internet locations on the World Wide Web when I want to provide some introductory background on myself. I could list many new uses after decades of a use which had a multifactorial motivational base: to help me get a job, to get a new job, to help me make more money, to enrich my experience and to add something refreshing to my life as it was becoming increasingly stale for so many reasons in the day-to-day grind, to help me get away from supervisors and from situations I could not handle or were a cause of great stress, to help me flee from settings where my health was preventing me from continuing successfully in my job, to help me engage in new forms of adventure, pioneering, amusement, indeed, to help me survive life’s tests in the myriad forms that afflict the embattled spirit, et cetera, et cetera, inter alia, inter alia, inter alter inter alter. The use of the resume always saved me from having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. One could photocopy it and mail it out with the covering letter to anyone and everyone. The photocopier became a common feature of the commercial, business and government world in the 1960s just as I began to send out the first of the literally thousands of job applications that I would over the next forty years: 1967-2007. One didn’t have to write the application out each time; one did not have to “say it again Sam” in resume after resume to the point of utter tedium. The photocopier itself evolved as did the gestetner. There were many ways one could copy one's basic data. For a time, my mother used to type applications for me. I became entrenched in the job market in the 1960s. This entrenchment was so very much like trench-warfare back in that Great War of 1914 to 1918--when millions died, were simply mowed down on the European continent in a process whose meaning we have yet to fully plumb. But, however little or much we have come to understand the meaning and significance of WW1, we--my generation--have come to experience a new warfare. As Henry Miller, one of the first to get away with using the "F" word in his trilogy: Sexus, Nexus and Plexus, expressed back in 1941 the new warfare of my generation: "a war far more terrible than the destruction" of the first two wars, the first two phases, with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble." It is not my intention to document any of these three phases of the destructive calamity that visited humankind in the century I have just left, for this documentation has been done in intimate detail elsewhere, both visually, orally and in print. I do not document but I frequently refer to these three phases. I have different purposes here than mere historical documentation. My job application process was clearly, at least as I look back over half a century of the process, part of that third war. Applying for jobs as extensively as I did in the days before the email and the internet became, though, an activity sometimes resembling a dry-wretch. Four to five thousand job applications from 1957 to 2007 is a lot of applications! At least since the mid-1990s, a few clicks of one’s personal electronic-computer system and some aspect of life’s game can go on or can come to a quick end over a set of wires under the ground, the electronic world of cyberspace. During that half-century of job-hunting years I applied, as I say, for some four to five thousand jobs, an average of two a week for each of all those years! This is a guesstimation, of course, as accurate a guesstimation as I can calculate for this fifty year period. The great bulk, 99.9% of those thousands of letters involved in this vast, detailed and, from time to time, exhausting and frustrating process, I did not keep. I did keep a small handful of them, perhaps half a dozen of all those letters, in a file in my Letters: Section VII, Sub-Section X, a part of my autobiographical work which is now entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs. This autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs goes for 2600 pages in five volumes and, due to its length, will not likely be read while I occupy space on this mortal coil. Much of my autobiography, portions of it, are now found, though, on the internet at a multitude of sites where in nano-micro-seconds anyone can find portions of my writing. I am known in a multitude of microcosms, microworlds, miniworlds, where neither name nor fame can reach me, and where all the problems that go with any degree of celebrity status in our fame-hungry world will pass me by into cyberspace, into an electronic ether. Given the thousands of hours over so many years devoted to the job-hunting process; given the importance of this key to my venture across two continents, two marriages, with at least two personalities being the bipolar person that I am; given that this new style of pioneering, voyaging-via-employment venture in our time has been at the core of my life with so much that has radiated around this core; given the amount of paper produced, the amount of energy expended and the amount of money earned and spent in this great exercise of survival; given the amount of writing done in the context of those various jobs, some of this employment-related correspondence seemed to warrant a corner in the written story of my life. It seemed appropriate, at least it was my desire as I entered the years when I no longer applied for jobs, to write this short statement fitting all those thousands of unkept resumes and job-applications into a larger context as well as all those letters, emails and internet posts written in connection with trying to make connections with others, into some larger framework of action and meaning. For those who would like to read more on this theme, I invite them to go to the internet site: Baha’i Library Online>Secondary Source Material>Personal Letters>The Letters of RonPrice: 1957-2007. If such readers prefer, they can simple google: Ron Price Letters and more of this story will become available with only a few clicks.

1. EMPLOYMENT & SOCIAL ROLES: 1944-2008 1999-2008-Writer/Poet/Retired Teacher: George Town Tasmania 2002-2005-Program Presenter, City Park Radio, Launceston 1999-2004-Tutor and/or President: George Town School for Seniors Inc 1988-1999 -Lecturer in General Studies and Human Services West Australian Department of Training 1986-1987 -Acting Lecturer in Management Studies and Co-ordinator of Further Education Unit at Hedland College in South Hedland, WA. 1982-1985 -Adult Educator, Open College of Tafe, Katherine, NT 1981 -Maintenance Scheduler, Renison Bell, Zeehan, Tasmania 1980-Unemployed: Bi-Polar Disability 1979 -Editor, External Studies Unit, Tasmanian CAE; Youth Worker, Resource Centre Association, Launceston; Lecturer in Organizational Behaviour, Tasmanian CAE; Radio Journalist ABC, Launceston 1976-1978 -Lecturer in Social Sciences & Humanities, Ballarat CAE, Ballarat 1975 - Lecturer in Behavioural Studies, Whitehorse Technical College, Box Hill, Victoria 1974 -Senior Tutor in Education Studies, Tasmanian CAE, Launceston 1972-1973 -High School Teacher, South Australian Education Department 1971 Primary School Teacher, Whyalla SA, Australia 1969-1971 Primary School Teacher, Prince Edward County Board of Education, Picton, Ontario, Canada 1969 Systems Analyst, Bad Boy Co. Ltd., Toronto Ontario 1967-68 -Community Teacher, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Frobisher Bay(Iqaluit), NWT, Canada 1959-67 -Summer jobs from grade 9 to end of university 1949-1967 - Attended 2 primary schools, 2 high schools and 2 universities in Canada: McMaster Uni:1963-1966, Windsor T’s College: 1966/7. 1944-1963 -Childhood(1944-57) and adolescence(1957-63) in and around Hamilton Ontario. 2. SOME SOCIO-BIO-DATA(as of: 2008) I have been married for 41 years. My wife is a Tasmanian, aged 60. We’ve had 3 children: ages in 2008-42, 38 and 31. I am 64, a Canadian who moved to Australia in 1971 and have written 3 books--all available on the internet. I retired from full-time teaching in 1999, from part-time teaching in 2003 and from volunteer/casual teaching/work in 2005 after 35 years in classrooms. In addition, I have been a member of the Baha’i Faith for 49 years. Bio-data: 6ft, 225 lbs, eyes/hair-brown, Caucasian. See my website for more details at: index or go the google search engine and type: RonPrice(no space), Pioneering RonPrice, RonPrice Poetry, RonPrice Bahá’í, RonPrice History,(philosophy, religion, media studies, politics, inter alia)--for additional writings.